About Ashley Bickerton

Ashley Bickerton rose to prominence in New York’s East Village Art scene in the early 1980s with his coolly abstract portraits composed of riveted and painted black containers, replacing the conventional figurative portrait with brand names, and his own invented logos (like “culture lux” and “suzie”) and mottos (“The best in sensory and intellectual experiences”). Alongside Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman, Bickerton was a pioneer of Neo-Geometric (“Neo-Geo”) Conceptualism, which rejected Neo-Expressionist trends in painting and critiqued the mechanization and commercialization of the modern world, using geometry as a metaphor for society. In 1993, Bickerton moved to the Indonesian island of Bali, where his work has become increasingly figurative, populated by a cast of grotesque and exotic characters, from voluptuous indigenous women to grimacing, anthropomorphic serpents. Whether painting directly on the human body, making sculpture, or creating large-scale hyper-realistic paintings framed in worm-eaten driftwood, Bickerton continues to call the commodification of the art object into question.